poetry

  The quiet page is drenched but the snow keeps filling it up your fountain pen loops are the tangles you couldn’t comb out of your daughter’s hair when you were alive knotted now in the walls of a hummingbird’s … Read More

  —after Zhang Zao   A letter opens and time turns back a letter opens and a wound appears a letter opens with an apology and closes with an exclamation point a letter opens and the words are like birds … Read More

  you were born between having & not having: in a cream-tone house   with orange trimming, bombs hang on either side of your country   like parentheses. there are grocery stores, swings & grass, but no seasons—   just … Read More

  Standing and staring out into the murky spaces of night where the bushes lose themselves to obscurity, a scintillation occurs, a happenstance, a brief blinking, off/on, as in: non-being/being. Firefly, lightning bug, as though to exist is to bug, … Read More

  which in this country means just gone two, a speckled black and white cat creeping under a hedge, the sun an orange foil over high rooftops, lawn damp and shimmery in the gleaned light, ornaments on the bare branches … Read More

  I am the parasol through which she enters this world and if I were to rid myself   of her, pull her from me like a layer of skin, she would roam this land   like a beast, using … Read More

  Bells. Then silence and trembling. Touching a photograph, I count the dead. The furnace rumbles.   Candles flare. There’s no card from my mother to stand with the others on the mantle.   As a child, I fell asleep … Read More

  I make supplications to the birds whose feathers were blades, lost in war. birds whose bones could no longer be found in the museum, because they flew over the face of the sky, in a time of climate change. … Read More

  the day an airplane crashed, the air became heavy with the aura of mouths sore with grieving songs. I was taught to plead with the fire in my broken tongue as would an owl, tired of nocturne. the confession … Read More

  —for M.F.O.   Sent to the front, all around me                       crack & steel fire, shouting voices— I feared no death, only sat down bullets buzzing hornets past head—            And roar became silence—   But sun shone anvils heat                   pack … Read More

  First, the remains of foil balloons littering the bank of the pond, a string once tied to a child’s wrist. Then, a pilot in uniform,   perhaps on leave, stepping quietly past the jungle gym and benches, with his … Read More

  When your husband is buried just a few steps away from the house how can you ever leave? When you can open the front door and say “It’s a beautiful day, dear,” and you’re talking to your dead husband … Read More